


phoenix

by puella_peanut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: F/M, Inspired by a Trailer, Now with a Podfic version, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-17 00:49:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12353961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/puella_peanut/pseuds/puella_peanut
Summary: In which Kylo offers, and Rey makes her choice—for she has nothing left to burn but herself.Note: Now with a Podfic version by Azdaema Pods (Azdaema). Link inside!





	phoenix

There remain only ghosts between them now and they have long since ceased to be the speaking kind. Whatever caution the shadows of other lives have entertained have been razed to the ground—martyred to a cause that cast their lots to the pyre. It is only a waiting man and a scalded girl that now remain.

It is enough.

Ben Solo, child lost to the flame and Rey—a girl choked by the ashes it left behind.

(Their former titles, such useless, feeble things; comprised of orphan scribbles on lonely dunes and the names of borrowed men they have both outgrown.) Whatever gathering of person those letters of hers invoke are simply just more remiges this slip of a girl must shed.

That will come in due time—he is certain of it, now.

He stands before her, Kylo Ren; shadows behind, smoke above and a burning inside, watching. Waiting. She is draped over his eyes like smoke, her final attack still sunk into his skin, lingering in a wound that festers, the anarchy of her pride drawn to the potential it suggests.

(She is more like him than even he suspects.)

Her body has been hollowed since they have last been in each other's keeping, carved from the inside out by internal defeat. Desire raises its head half-mast—a lurking beast in singed fingertips, shoulders that are coiled and tensed and bare. Her gaze much the same.

Luke, Kylo allows momentarily, had always been the giver and receiver of paradox; both cunning and a fool. He had seen the girl fly so he clipped her wings—but in the process, old sack of bones that he was, had forgotten that she had claws. Realization came too late—he fed her curiosity, nurtured her ambition for too long and upon attempts to curb her insatiable appetite, found that nothing would.

In his abandonment, a flock of the darkest parts of herself had risen in his wake, devious little birds clamoring for attention. And she had lashed out in all directions, swung both lightsaber and heart to the past, the future, everything she had ever known—chasing herself to this moment, beaks stretched to bite, talons peeling back the falsehoods of an old man. Delusions of a young girl. Eventually bringing herself to the current edge; boundaries of a self-imposed nest charred and curled to rot.

(All that is left to ignite is herself.)

There is nothing to control the contrails of her flight now, Kylo muses when she stirs—she is guided only by the rhythm of instinct: a raw, unbarred thing. Lit like a fuse, an infantry line in the steady pounding of her breast. Beat on and on and on.

And Kylo Ren stands before her triumphant and knows he controls the lifeline of that desire—he is the heartbeat of her cause, the pulse of her will.

They have always marched to this drumline of compromise: _Let the past die. Kill it if you have to. That’s the only way to become...what you were meant to be._

It has been churned and molded into their bones; chaotic like a storm, its debris scattered in their blood like iron. Tipping the scales of their lives—they have learned its lesson well during their dalliance with fire: one must be burned by the flame to be born from the ashes. It is as endless cycle, a mantra long mastered by their kind.

Death and rebirth. Rebirth and death. Parasitic twins of a different kind. One cannot live without the other.

(She is no Jedi. Nor is he.)

They are simply the same. Nothing more, nothing less.

So when Rey finally speaks, she does so in the language of defeat: voice bowed low before desire like a slave, words just matchsticks her will devours.

“I need someone…to show me my place...in all this.” She meets his gaze, plucked naked and bare and Kylo responds with silence. He lingers there, smoldering among the flames. Stirred from the smoke into the shadow, he is glittering and cold and bright. An ember heartbeat, a pulseline humming in a body of ash.

(What are words really, in the light of such a victory as this one?)

And in a moment, he will offer his hand—for she will need someone to lead her to the stake.

And in a moment, he knows she will take it—for she has nothing left to burn but herself.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] phoenix](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14320182) by [Azdaema Pods (Azdaema)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azdaema/pseuds/Azdaema%20Pods)




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